Albert Wohlstetter

Albert Wohlstetter is considered as one of the main influences on neoconservatism and to have influenced Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard Perle, together with figures such as Ahmed Chalabi. Wohlstetter himself, is said to be a protege of the 'Machiavellian' academic Leo Strauss.[1]Although it has been asserted that no major book has identified Wohlstetter as a neoconservative.[2]According to Jim Lobe, Richard Perle was very close to Wohlstetter and married his daughter.[3]

According to a history of the RAND Corporation by Alex Abella, Wohlstetter: "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."[4] This also adds that Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. It claims that the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi (the Iraqi exile and source of false intelligence to the Pentagon)"in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office." The American Enterprise Institute, one of the main institutional manifestations of neoconservative thought, named its auditorium the "Wohlstetter Conference Center."[5]

A review of the biography also observes that, like many neoconservatives, in his younger days Wohlstetter was very much on the Left and:

...was briefly a member of a Communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party's records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.[6]

From 1951 to 1963, he served first as a consultant and later as a senior policy analyst for the RAND Corporation, and maintained his affiliation with RAND for years afterward. He and his wife also advised both Democratic and Republican administrations, including President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. On February 25, 1963, the Wohlstetters published "Studies for a Post-Communist Cuba." [8][9]

The Iraq deception

Wohlstetter was a significant actor in the deception leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. According to Alex Abella's book on the RAND corporation:

Ahmed Chalabi's rise to prominence in Washington circles came at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office. Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, a friend of Wolfowitz and Wohlstetter, had already talked up the exile to both men, knowing they would see the value of Chalabi's acquaintance. Wolfowitz, Wohlstetter, and Lewis shared similar values and background; each of them secular Jews, defenders of Israel, devoted to reason and to the spread of American values. Wohlstetter and Lewis shared a common fascination with how Kemal Atatürk created the modern, secular Turkish state -- seeing it as a model for the new Iraq Chalabi would lead. Wohlstetter and Lewis expected that after the depredations of Saddam Hussein, Chalabi and his exile organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), could restore the cradle of civilization to her proper place in the world, with a secular government that would make peace with Israel, serve as an example to the Arab "street" -- and never wage war on the United States. [12]

As the record shows, these expectations proved to be wholly without foundation.

Albert Wohlstetter is considered as one of the main influences on neoconservatism and to have influenced Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard Perle, together with figures such as Ahmed Chalabi. Wohlstetter himself, is said to be a protege of the 'Machiavellian' academic Leo Strauss.[14]Although it has been asserted that no major book has identified Wohlstetter as a neoconservative.[15]According to Jim Lobe, Richard Perle was very close to Wohlstetter and married his daughter.[16]

"Epistemic communities" and the neocons

Peter M. Haas' (1992) essay in International Organization[17], described what he termed an 'epistemic community,' a theoretical definition of a transnational network of 'knowledge-based' experts and pundits whose definitions of problems were aimed at decision-makers in an effort to frame what the problems they face were, what form discourse should take, the methods of approach and the likely outcomes. According to Hass'[18] development of his theoretical work on epistemic communities, there is evidence that the European-American Workshop, a "community of experts" chaired by Albert Wohlstetter, "induced NATO to deploy Pershing II missiles at the end of the 1970s as a counter to the threat of the Soviet SS-20s." Wohlstetter later went on the join the advisory board of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies (IEDSS) which itself aimed to act as an 'epistemic community'.

The theory is of use in trying to interpret neoconservatism and its general influence. Mikael Sundström makes this observation of the process of how epistemic communities function:

National decision-makers find it increasingly difficult to keep up with the steadily swelling river of information pertaining to different issue-areas. Eventually, they will need someone to abbreviate the information into manageable portions. This translation-process opens up new avenues of influence, as the experts who will perform the interpretation, unlike traditional advisers, can slant the information on which the decision-makers will base their deliberations, as well as present their views on how this already coloured information, should be interpreted. With growing internationalisation, the experts in various issue-areas will meet their extra-national peers, to discuss problems and possible solutions. If this information-exchange is frequent enough, the national expert will be coloured by his colleagues’ views, or, rather, by the aggregate views of the international community of experts to which he belongs —the epistemic community.[19]

Sundström breaks down Haas' definition of epistemic communities, again drawing on Haas' (1992) International Organization, and states that an epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area. The professionals may be from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds but must have:

(1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for the social action of community members.

(2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the multiple linkages between possible policy action and desired outcomes

(3) shared notions of validity — that is, intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of their expertise

(4) a common policy enterprise — that is, a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed, presumably out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence.

Understanding of neoconservatism and its networks via this theoretical standpoint is complicated by the covert, propagandistic and ideological nature of the neocons: its para-political nature whereby it engages in dis-information; and the use of the neocons by governments and other agencies or elements within them is somewhat opaque, but on the other hand much information has emerged since the end of the Cold War, which can be used to gain an insight into this. However Haas' elaboration on the motives why decision-makers will seek the advice from the epistemic community include uncertainty and inadequate information about the situation at hand, inadequacy of available general knowledge needed for assessing the expected outcomes of different courses of action), the decision-maker:

"...lacks many of the conditions facilitating a focus on power...[it is difficult] to identify their political allies and to be sure of what strategies are most likely to help them retain power...[and] poorly understood conditions may create enough turbulence that established operating procedures may break down, making institutions unworkable".[20]

These uncertainties and dependence are exacerbated in matters which fall under the rubric of security and defence and the attendant secrecy and evasion, unfamilarity and information-complexity which foster and increase the deference paid to 'technical expertise'. With its make-up of key government advisers, the neocons also conform to another key component of the definition of the epistemic community, as Sundström (again drawing on Hass) outlines:

If the epistemic community is to exert any influence over policies, they must have links to the actual decision-makers. Without such power-links, epistemic communities would have questionable significance as Haas points out when he states that "...it is unclear how effective consensus knowledge is, as an independent variable, at explaining or predicting state behaviour". He also offers us more practical pointers: "...epistemic communities can insinuate their views and influence national governments and international organisations by occupying niches in advisory and regulatory bodies."[21]

In the (1992) special volume of International Organization, Haas discussed the value of the concept of epistemic community in understanding the way in which specialist technical advice can re-orient state behaviour and explain convergences in international policy stating: "The view presented in this volume is that epistemic communities are channels through which new ideas circulate from societies to governments as well as from country to country."

While acknowledging that contextual factors shape epistemic influence (the Cold War and the connection to the Israel lobby in the case of the neocons), an understanding of the extent and intent of certain networks, why epistemic communities are successful in influencing the direction of policy change, and how they operate is important to expanding the concept's utility. Haas argued that understanding the research agenda, involves identifying:

the community membership

determining the community members’ principled and causal beliefs

tracing their activities

demonstrating their influence on decision makers at various points in time

He argued that comparative studies of organizations are necessary, in identifying where the community is present in a certain policy area and where it has been active and identifying those in which it has not been active or wholly absent.

If we regard the neocons as an epistemic community then it is a closed epistemic community and as such has an ambiguous status: few employees, not quite controlling a policy institute or a think tank (with some possible exceptions) but functioning with political action committees and 'front groups' that, through statements, conferences, publications and reports attempt to bolster support for an agressive US foreign policy, increased military spending and (in the past) the siting of nuclear weapons and a more aggressive global war against the then Soviet Union, which was extended to cast dissent as part of a communist conspiracy — and the subsequent re-working of this in terms of the middle-east. As a European outpost of neoconservatism (particularly through the New Atlantic Initiative the IEDSS is also a component of the social psychology of how people are conditioned by authority figures and institutions in regard to the state committing terrible acts against their fellow human beings.[22]

Its status as a closed community mirrors the communities it seeks to influence. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite [23], observed that epistemic communities in nuclear regulation have been much more closed than in drug regulation and it is extremely rare for NGO representatives to be at the table, although there are incidences where material previously kept secret were shared with other specialists. The IEDSS, with its campaigns against dissent was involved in distancing NGOs further from the proximity of the decision-making process. Volker Rittberger and Peter Mayer[24], put forward a theoretical basis for understanding international regimes as systems of norms and rules agreed upon by states to govern their behavior in specific political contexts or 'issue areas'. Regimes are defined as the rules of the game agreed upon by actors in the international arena.

Nascent neoconservatives

According to his biography at RAND, Wohlstetter was a mathematical logician and senior staff member at RAND in the 1950s and 1960s and:

...became one of the world's leading nuclear and national security strategists. His studies led to the "second-strike" and "Fail-Safe" concepts for deterring nuclear war. These and other methods reduced the probability of accidental war. Wohlstetter was affiliated with institutions such as the European-American Institute, the Hoover Institution, and PAN Heuristics Services. He received the Medal of Freedom for his contributions toward national security. He earned degrees from Columbia University and later taught at UCLA and UC Berkeley and then for many years at the University of Chicago.[25]

Many of his major works (from the 1950s-60s) are available in their entirety on the RAND website. While at Chicago, Wohlstetter was also known for attracting the nascent neoconservatives:

“To join Team Wohlstetter, apparently, one had to embrace unquestioningly his world views, which eschewed old-fashioned intelligence as a basis for assessing the enemy’s intentions and military capabilities in favor of elaborate statistical models, probabilities, reasoning, systems analysis, and game theory developed at RAND.”[26]

Paul Nitze has had a huge mark on my career over many, many years, starting with 1969, when I was still a very much wet-behind-the-ears graduate student who came to Washington to work with three great men: Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, and Albert Wohlstetter.[27]

Wohlstetter is also said to have sent Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to work on the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a conservative hawk committed to working on behalf of the US defense industry, and for Wolfowitz and Perle to intern for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Cold War think tank co-founded by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and former Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze.[28] This is also thought to be precursory moves to the formation of the “Team B” intelligence analysis team as Nitze used Wohlstetter’s assertions in testimony to accuse Henry Kissinger and the CIA of dangerously underestimating the Soviet Union’s military strength and its intentions. As Craig Unger put it:

This was the beginning of a thirty-year fight against the national security apparatus in which the [neoconservatives] mastered the art of manipulating intelligence in order to implement hard-line, militaristic policies.”[29]

According to his obituary in the New York Times, as a member of RAND's research council and chairman of its research program on conflict in allied, neutral and satellite countries, the studies Wohlstetter carried out in the 1950's were all done for the US Defense Department, and were for the most part highly secret.[30]

Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski's collection of Wohlstetter’s writing state that Wohlstetter was recruited into RAND by Charles Hitch who had served in the OSS. [31]

Going Ballistic

Wohlstetter was 77 when he joined the advisory council of the IEDSS and his writings of the period have been gathered at a dedicated website, these included contributions to Commentary, Foreign Affairs and The National Interest, the site also adds that in the mid to late 1980s he:

...co-chaired the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (CILTS), the mandate of which was to reassess America's approach to foreign policy and propose "adjustments to US military strategy in view of a changing security environment in the decades ahead."The membership of Commission drew from a wide range of bipartisan expertise:

Anne L. Armstrong, former US ambassador to Britain;

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor;

William P. Clark, Reagan's deputy defense secretary and later National Security Advisor;

GEN Bernard A. Schriever (ret.), US Air Force proponent of space and ballistic missile research; and

GEN John W. Vessey (ret.), former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[32]

In the early 1990s, he served on the US Defense Policy Board and provided outside advice to the Pentagon after Iraq invaded Kuwait. The site also tells us that together with Margaret Thatcher, he authored "What the West Must Do in Bosnia," an open letter to President Clinton, published in the Wall Street Journal in 1993, and signed by Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, Karl Popper, Eugene Rostow, George Shultz, George Soros, Susan Sontag, and Paul Wolfowitz. The site also informs us that in the mid-1970s, Wohlstetter and a team of researchers at Pan Heuristics conducted a series of studies to "clarify the empirical record of the strategic competition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R." The study "Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back?" was published in the now-defunct periodical, Survey.

The point was to test whether the competition looked like a "spiraling" or "exponentially increasing" arms race, or rather like something else.[33]

However the date given for this is Survey, 1976, so this is most likely to be the Survey edited by Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz (the former also with the IEDSS). Wohlstetter's "Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back?," appeared in Robert Conquest's (1977) Defending America (published by Basic Books).

Wohlstetter ran Pan Heuristics Services, Inc., a California-based consulting firm dealing in security policy whose clients included the US departments of State and Defense as well as private corporations. This also included Zalmay Khalilzad (the ambassador to Iraq, nominated to succeed John Bolton as the US representative to the United Nations). In the mid-1980s he was also president of the European American Institute for Security Research which in 1986 was funded by The Carthage Foundation, itself part of the Scaife network of foundations, and before that, in 1979 it was funded by the Ford Foundation.[34] While at EAISR, Wohlstetter wrote against organisations such as CND and challenged 'Nuclear-winter theorists' and the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine:

Would nuclear war endanger civilization or even the human species? Does that possibility require us to subordinate all considerations of freedom to survival and to dismiss any possibility of responding justly to a nuclear attack—or at least without committing suicide? The question has a familiar ring to anyone whose memory stretches back as far as 1958 to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the famous controversy between the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook over whether it was better to be "Red or Dead."[35]

Wohlstetter insisted that there are ideologues in the West who seek "to foreclose any Western options for responding to nuclear attack other than the extremes of bringing on the apocalypse or giving up."

As mentioned, according to Peter Hass[36], there is evidence that the European-American Workshop, a "community of experts" chaired by Wohlstetter, "induced NATO to deploy Pershing II missiles at the end of the 1970s as a counter to the threat of the Soviet SS-20s." Much of the IEDSS' work can be identified as having a similar drive (including its covert work in relation to DS 19 against CND and other left groups) and the neglect and absence of analysis of the IEDSS role here are surprising given the continuities.

James Digby's (1980) Modern Weapons for Non-NATO Contingencies, prepared for RAND[37], notes that in 1975, the problems of bringing US and Western military force to bear on the NATO flanks and outside NATO had begun to get consistent attention in several related series of workshops, including the European-American Workshops. Wohlstetter, who headed the organization which ran the Workshops, "would address these sessions with ideas like those he later wrote for one of a series of articles for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times." This also notes that Wohlstetter took part in a Workshop on "The Alliance and the Persian Gulf," held at Elvetham Hall (near London), 27-29 June 1980.

According to a (1981) New York Times report the European-American workshop on security issues included a number of members of Parliament from NATO countries, as well as military and Western European disarmament specialists and security experts. The 1981 meeting was for Lawrence S. Eagleburger to express the US' willingness to talk with the Soviet Union, and dispell the "impressions created in Europe by the anti-Soviet tone of speeches by President Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr [...] and that the NATO modernization program was an attempt to Europeanize any future nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union." [38]

W. Scott Thompson's (1978) Power Projection: A Net Assessment of the U. S. and Soviet Capabilities (published by Transaction Publishers) observes (p.84) that Digby presented papers at the European-American Workshops, which were sponsored by RAND and the Defense Nuclear Agency. Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski's collection of Wohlstetter’s writing state that the European-American Workshops were the same organisation as the European American Institute for Security Research. This also involved other RAND associates: James F. Digby[39], Uwe Nerlich[40], Pierre Hasner[41] and others.[42]. Thompson was an associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and the publication is a product of the National Strategy Information Center — which included the IEDSS' Frank Shakespeare together with Eugene V. Rostow, Sven F. Kraemer and Roy Godson.

Wohlstetter was in communication by phone with a number of Americans and Europeans concerned with SDI in preparation for a meeting on SDI at Ditchley Park in England.

According to RAND, these included "Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire: Implications for Western Security," held in Ditchley Park, May 18-20, 1984.

Also on the Executive Committee of the Aron-Wohlstetter European-American Workshop was Devon Gaffney Cross (associated with various neoconservative projects) president of the Donors' Forum on International Affairs, which represents a consortium of foundations active in foreign policy and national security grant making. Cross is also Executive Director of the Gilder Foundation, from 1984-1993, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and worked for Foreign Policy Magazine, and the Washington Quarterly, a publication of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.[43]

Wohlstetter's contribution lay in a rethinking of the nuclear strategy known as “mutually assured destruction” (MAD). For Wohlstetter MAD was ineffective because it led to the mutual neutralization of nuclear arsenals and reciprocal suicide. Wohlstetter proposed a contrary "graduated deterrence," involving the acceptance of limited war, the use of tactical nuclear and precision-guided weapons capable of hitting the enemy's military apparatus. Wohlstetter criticized the politics of nuclear arms limitations arguing that it would restrict the technological creativity of the US. He was also influential in encouraging Ronald Reagan's launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or 'Star Wars'.[44]

Resources, Links, References

Further Reading

Abella, Alex. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (Harcourt, 2008). ISBN 978-0-15-101081-3.

Tom Barry, A History of Threat Escalation. Remembering Team B, RightWeb Analysis, February 12, 2004: "Wohlstetter, who had left his full-time position at RAND to become a professor at the University of Chicago, organized an informal study group that included younger neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and longtime hawks like Paul H. Nitze."

↑Here, Wohlstetter together with others from RAND, such as his colleague Herman Khan became synonymous with a seeming blasé attitude to nuclear annihilation — characterised by film director Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove', of which they and RAND (the 'BLAND' Corporation in the film) were used as inspiration. See: Dan Seligman (2001) Supergenius: The Mega Worlds of Herman Kahn by B. Bruce Briggs.

↑John Vinocur (1981) US Tell Allies it wants talk with Soviets, The New York Times.

↑Digby was head of the Operations Department at RAND, working with Herman Kahn and Wohlstetter overseeing studies on strategic warfare and air defense, see: Malibu Times (2008) Obituaries: James F. Digby.

↑In early 2000, the leading European technology and science service provider Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft (IABG) based in Ottobrunn near Munich started to bring together leading European defence analysis organisations to form a working group called the "European Security and Defence Analysis Group” (ESDAG) of which Nerlich is chairman: the group comprises of QINETIQ and others, and is related to the European Defence Agency. See: IABG (2005) IABG-led cooperation strengthens European security research.